I Hate Firefox

Seriously, has any piece of software gone from good to shit as quickly as Firefox? I've got a newly-opened window that I'm typing an email in (that's it, no other windows or tabs) and it just crashes out of the blue. I seriously don't use Firefox for anything important any more because it's guaranteed to crash at least once a day and--unlike Chrome--it takes down every open window. Chrome? I've got dozens of tabs open for weeks on end. And if a tab crashes I can just refresh it--no restarting the process.

That's not to even mention the memory leaks which cause it to gobble 2GB with only a couple of tabs open. And it's not plugins because I don't use any plugins in Firefox.

I want to start a dead pool--how long until Firefox goes away for good?

I feel obliged at this point to mention my favoured browser, which is Iron. Same as Google Chrome, but with all Google 'report-to-base-ware' removed at source code level by some meticulous German persons. So, you get all the fabulousness of Chromium family browsers (like the near-instant load time, stability, all of that) but with no worries about what the browser might be sending back to Mr and Mrs Google about what it (and you) are doing, unless of course you use a Google account or something (and yes, Iron does support browser synchronisation and the other usual Google Chrome stuff).

I feel obliged at this point to mention my favoured browser, which is Iron. Same as Google Chrome, but with all Google 'report-to-base-ware' removed at source code level by some meticulous German persons. So, you get all the fabulousness of Chromium family browsers (like the near-instant load time, stability, all of that) but with no worries about what the browser might be sending back to Mr and Mrs Google about what it (and you) are doing, unless of course you use a Google account or something (and yes, Iron does support browser synchronisation and the other usual Google Chrome stuff).

Hmm.. that looks interesting. I'd worry if they would keep up with critical updates, though. And having Google spy on me doesn't concern me much (I use Google Apps for home and work, have an Android phone, use Google for every search) so Google already owns me like Dred Scott.

Seriously, has any piece of software gone from good to shit as quickly as Firefox? I've got a newly-opened window that I'm typing an email in (that's it, no other windows or tabs) and it just crashes out of the blue. I seriously don't use Firefox for anything important any more because it's guaranteed to crash at least once a day and--unlike Chrome--it takes down every open window. Chrome? I've got dozens of tabs open for weeks on end. And if a tab crashes I can just refresh it--no restarting the process.

That's not to even mention the memory leaks which cause it to gobble 2GB with only a couple of tabs open. And it's not plugins because I don't use any plugins in Firefox.

I want to start a dead pool--how long until Firefox goes away for good?

I don't think Firefox is going to go away.

But to your point and to Cad, when I first heard of Firefox I understood it was supposed to be a fast, lightweight, efficient browser, an answer to IE. It did that through . . . version 3-ish? Version 2 was still pretty lightweight; I started noticing bloat and memory leaks around version 4.

Google may be able to keep Chrome lightweight; I have my doubts. It looks to me like Chrome is what Firefox started out to be. Eventually I expect the cycle to repeat -- IE, Firefox, and Chrome will all be bloated -- and some other piece of software that looks to be the answer to the Web will come out professing to be the answer to all the browser problems.

Perhaps, perhaps not. IE sticks around because it's Windows' default (although it is getting to be pretty good in its own right); WebKit powers Chrome, Safari and almost every mobile browser out there; where does that leave Firefox? Firefox gained traction with people who were sick of IE, do you think those same people will hesitate to jump to a better browser? Most of these are fairly capable users who may ultimately decide to kick Firefox to the curb.

Google may be able to keep Chrome lightweight; I have my doubts. It looks to me like Chrome is what Firefox started out to be.

I doubt it will bloat. Google has already done so much to make web browsing better, faster and more secure: V8, SPDY and their work on fixing the broken fuckeree that is SSL. Firefox started as a decent browser and then grew bloated and crash-prone, and for what? Most of the features they've added are useless to me. I started using Chrome very reluctantly (search the TDWTF forum archives 3 years ago and you'll see me flaming Chrome) but now I'm convinced: Firefox can FOAD.

I just wish a few of my favorite Firefox extensions will be ported to Chrome; for example ShowIP is worth its weight in gold-pressed latinum.

Miraculously, the situation with Firefox is actually improving for me. I had version 3.23 installed for a while, and god, did it suck. Five tabs were enough to bring it to a crawl. The latest versions though are working quite fine... But, my browser of choice is still Opera. Distorts a page here and there, but choke-full of unique features I tend to like.

Overreacting? To shitty software that crashes more than Windows 95 with a buggy motherboard? Nothing I work with on a daily basis is a memory-leaking, CPU-hogging and unstable as Firefox. Chrome has had process-per-tab for 4 years now and Firefox still doesn't have it. Seriously, it's a clusterfuck. And recently, rather than fix all of the horrible problems plaguing their browser, Mozilla decided to jump 10 major version numbers in a few months. God knows why, probably a marketing gimmick to keep up with IE and Chrome.

Maybe it's stable for you, but you're a black swan; it sucks for almost everybody I talk to. And it's only gotten worse the last 5 years. I've been using Firefox since Phoenix 0.1--and before that I used crappy, weird Mozilla builds for Linux for several years--so I'm not new to Gecko or Mozilla. But after something like 12 years of use I am sick and tired of it. Chrome does it far better, far faster and far more securely.

Miraculously, the situation with Firefox is actually improving for me. I had version 3.23 installed for a while, and god, did it suck. Five tabs were enough to bring it to a crawl.

It may be improving but I still think it blows. The gulf between Chrome and Firefox is like the gulf between Windows 7 and Windows 3.1. If Chrome is a light sabre, Firefox is a caveman smashing rocks together until he accidentally busts his hand open, gets sepsis and dies.

But, my browser of choice is still Opera. Distorts a page here and there, but choke-full of unique features I tend to like.

I used to flame Opera users but then I stopped caring; if you want to drive your car around with the parking brake on, be my guest. I have never worked anywhere that gaves two shits about Opera. At several places I've worked I've directed support to tell Opera users who call in to use a real browser (in nicer language, of course). I've had bosses ask me "Do we support Opera?" to which I reply "I don't know, it's your call. But out of the 20 billion pages we served this month only 7 went to Opera" which is usually met with "Why are we even wasting our time talking about this?"

I've used it longer. Also, I can tell you the precise release where things started going to shit: 1.5. That was the first release which was worse than the last. More memory leaks, slower performance and more memory bugs. For a while I thought 2.x was on the right track, then 3.0 came out and I knew we were well and truly fucked.

@Severity One said:

...for me it's unsurpassed in terms of plug-ins that make your life so much easier.

Bah, what plugins do you need that Chrome doesn't have reasonable facsimiles of? (Excluding ShowIP, of course, which I mentioned above.)

@Severity One said:

And it's rock stable for me. Never ever crashes. At home, I've got loads of tabs open, but other than eating up memory, it has no discernable effect whatsoever.

I call bullshit. I haven't seen a stable Firefox for many years. And I've used it on multiple OSes, hardware configurations, etc..

@Severity One said:

Did it crash in the past? Sure, probably. But not 11.0.

What the fuck, are you some kind of Mozilla Troll? Tell your masters to get off their asses, to stop trolling message boards with obvious bullshit and to fix their goddamn browser. It didn't "Sure, probably" crash in the past, it abso-fucking-lutely did. And I wrote this fucking post after 11.0 crashed on me twice in 20 minutes for no goddamn reason, so don't tell me 11.0 is some paragon of stability.

I've used it longer. Also, I can tell you the precise release where things started going to shit: 1.5. That was the first release which was worse than the last. More memory leaks, slower performance and more memory bugs. For a while I thought 2.x was on the right track, then 3.0 came out and I knew we were well and truly fucked.

@Severity One said:

...for me it's unsurpassed in terms of plug-ins that make your life so much easier.

Bah, what plugins do you need that Chrome doesn't have reasonable facsimiles of? (Excluding ShowIP, of course, which I mentioned above.)

@Severity One said:

And it's rock stable for me. Never ever crashes. At home, I've got loads of tabs open, but other than eating up memory, it has no discernable effect whatsoever.

I call bullshit. I haven't seen a stable Firefox for many years. And I've used it on multiple OSes, hardware configurations, etc..

I share Severity One's experience. The only problems with FF i had weren't FF's fault.

Before i upgraded my pc's ram from 256mb to 1gb, plain FF (100mb binary, i blame the static linking of big libs) filled it to 220mb. When i hit pages where the content:ad ratio goes like 1:4 (sometimes even worse) ff had to load so many ads in ram that 75% of the cputime was wasted on swapping, slowing it to a crawl (only hard reset could save it, even the sysrq+REISUB didn't work), unable to start new apps or kill em. Solution: Pull the network cable from the switch, wait 5 min. That's when, between the swapping, enough cycles had passed to cause ff to time out and stop swapping. After upgrade: never crashed, ever.

What the fuck, are you some kind of Mozilla Troll? Tell your masters to get off their asses, to stop trolling message boards with obvious bullshit and to fix their goddamn browser. It didn't "Sure, probably" crash in the past, it abso-fucking-lutely did. And I wrote this fucking post after 11.0 crashed on me twice in 20 minutes for no goddamn reason, so don't tell me 11.0 is some paragon of stability.

My parents' XP box does have some probs though. When it exits there's an nullpointer exception. And some sites crash the thing for no reason at all while when i visit them on my pc it hums along just fine.

The only comments/inconviniences i have with ff is that it takes 1 minute to start,

it's my fault though: slow hd and i set it to save my session, i keep 10-15 tabs open at any given time; when i launch ff it loads them all and that takes a lot of time because we don't have much interweb bandwith and speed.

I use Fx both at work and home. Work is on a Win7 machine, and Firefox regularly used to crash. Since upgrading to the latest version it only seems to outright crash if I've left it running overnight with a Flash clip embedded on the page running. Otherwise, the latest version on Win7 is pretty stable for me. Sure, it uses a lot of RAM, but if nothing else needs it then I don't really care about that.

Because of the problems I had with the crashing on my work machine since Fx4, I held off for as long as possible on upgrading Firefox on my home machine, a Fedora14 box. I did that a couple of weeks ago, and haven't had it crash or freeze on me once, despite having near a dozen tabs open and not closing the browser at all, hell I've even had multiple instances of it running under different logins and they all played nice.

So, from my experience, sure it had some problems with versions 4+, but things have really improved now, and I use it as my regular browser, so it's not like Ihaven't put it through its paces properly.

...for me it's unsurpassed in terms of plug-ins that make your life so much easier.

Bah, what plugins do you need that Chrome doesn't have reasonable facsimiles of? (Excluding ShowIP, of course, which I mentioned above.)

Has anyone gotten round to implementing decent tree-style tabs yet? Top match in Google for me[1] is this which is still in beta, and whose UI doesn't fall into the 'decent' category. Google themselves removed their half-attempt back in November. None of the other top matches look promising.

I call bullshit. I haven't seen a stable Firefox for many years. And I've used it on multiple OSes, hardware configurations, etc..

So have I, and I've only seen stable FFXs, even if memory hoggy. There was 1 update of FFX that made it really crash-prone, about a year ago. It was an bug in the font renderer. It is completely an dutterly stable now, even moreso than Chrome on this machine. I had a runaway while-loop in JS last Friday that for some reason only FFX was able to detect and break off. Chrome and IE9 stopped responding.

Not that anyone cares, I'm sure, but I use Firefox and IE at work and at home, and I've never found Firefox to be unstable. I like it because it tends to start up a little quicker than IE, and more importantly I can open a new blank tab in about a second, whereas IE on my home machine takes several seconds for some weird reason (I don't have this problem on my work machine, so it's probably a weird setting somewhere; I don't know or much care what causes it). It also has a bunch of small usability features that I like - for instance, the "Paste & Go" option in the context menu for the address bar. And of course IE isn't available on the Ubuntu half of the kids' dual-boot machine.

Also, for some reason, some threads on the TDWTF forums have image links that don't work in IE but do work in FF. (I looked at the source for one once and it had stupid markup, I think it was something like width="" height="", which apparently IE interprets as "1 pixel is enough".) I haven't seen this problem anywhere else, so once again TRWTF is CS.

I don't really get the browser wars, though. In my experience, which I freely admit is far from universal, pretty much any browser is fine for normal use. Note that my definition of normal use doesn't include having more than say 10 or so tabs open, because I've never seen anyone actually do that; I've only heard people on the internet say they do. Most of the people I see using a browser have at most three or four tabs open. I'm sure if you regularly have 40 tabs open your needs and experience will be different, so go with whatever works for you.

I'm using FF on a shitty P4 with 2Gb of RAM and it works fine. I can't remember the last time that it crashed, and I can have several tabs open without any kind of problems.

I might be mistaken but I think that the amount of memory that FF uses depends on how much memory is available. On my system for example it usually never uses more than 250Mb with several tabs open, and uses around 60/80 Mb without on idle (without any websites loaded).

From my experience most of the times when FF crashes it's because of 3rd party plugins (not extras), namely Adobe Reader and the Java Platform SE (which FF now disables automatically)

Perhaps, perhaps not. IE sticks around because it's Windows' default (although it is getting to be pretty good in its own right); WebKit powers Chrome, Safari and almost every mobile browser out there; where does that leave Firefox? Firefox gained traction with people who were sick of IE, do you think those same people will hesitate to jump to a better browser? Most of these are fairly capable users who may ultimately decide to kick Firefox to the curb.

Google may be able to keep Chrome lightweight; I have my doubts. It looks to me like Chrome is what Firefox started out to be.

I doubt it will bloat. Google has already done so much to make web browsing better, faster and more secure: V8, SPDY and their work on fixing the broken fuckeree that is SSL. Firefox started as a decent browser and then grew bloated and crash-prone, and for what? Most of the features they've added are useless to me. I started using Chrome very reluctantly (search the TDWTF forum archives 3 years ago and you'll see me flaming Chrome) but now I'm convinced: Firefox can FOAD.

I just wish a few of my favorite Firefox extensions will be ported to Chrome; for example ShowIP is worth its weight in gold-pressed latinum.

Well, FireBug kind of was a firefox-brainchild, same as adblock, most of the Jscript-tools and they are pretty active behind the scenes with the whole HTML5-thing. So yeah, don't say they never did anything for you

Bah, what plugins do you need that Chrome doesn't have reasonable facsimiles of? (Excluding ShowIP, of course, which I mentioned above.)

No idea, since I don't really care about Chrome. I tried it when it first came out, with the little Google videos of these really cool people that are even cooler than Apple, and all wear T-shirts and have PhDs, and they make all these really cool products that are so cool that they could make a penguin sweat its pants (or tuxedo), and they give them for free to you because you're a cool dude, too.

I didn't like the look of it and it didn't have any plug-ins. So I ditched it and never looked back.

I call bullshit. I haven't seen a stable Firefox for many years. And I've used it on multiple OSes, hardware configurations, etc..

Works for me. With three 'app tabs' open (J2SE JavaDocs, J2EE JavaDocs and IE tab showing an intranet site), plus a blank tab, plus this site open, it gobbles up 800 MB. This is absolutely ridiculous, but hey. The computer (Windows 7) has been up for some 19 days, and it could be that Firefox has been running for that long as well, or perhaps I restarted it somewhere during that period (but not because it would have crashed or anything).

What the fuck, are you some kind of Mozilla Troll? Tell your masters to get off their asses, to stop trolling message boards with obvious bullshit and to fix their goddamn browser. It didn't "Sure, probably" crash in the past, it abso-fucking-lutely did. And I wrote this fucking post after 11.0 crashed on me twice in 20 minutes for no goddamn reason, so don't tell me 11.0 is some paragon of stability.

Well, FFX has Tab Groups under Ctrl+Shift+E, but its usability is all over the place. It's faster to mousewheel over the tab bar when you have 20 open.

But try it. YMMV.

One thing I see in opera that I think looks good is the tab stacking... It allows you to group tabs together and then gives you a windows-7-taskkbar-style preview of the tabs. I would like to see a firefox (or chrome) extension that can do this-- bonus points if the extension can let me auto-group tabs based on some user defined rules. (I find firefox's panorama/tab groups pretty irritating and useless)

One thing I see in opera that I think looks good is the tab stacking...

This? Conceptually not too different to the Tree Tab addon I linked to earlier (absent the preview of the contents.) But it will allow drag/drop to multiple levels, and allows open/closing of the (sub) trees - which leads me to a question about Opera's implementation - can you stack stacks? ('Opera tab stacking multiple stacks' isn't showing me anything promising.)@toothrot said:

bonus points if the extension can let me auto-group tabs based on some user defined rules

I'm so on the fence about FF at the moment. Live Severity One, I use some critical extensions that simply have no replacement. Not having NoScript is a deal breaker.

But FF has been pissing me off so much lately. It isn't crashing-- I've found it rather stable. Memory hog, yes, but I'll be willing to accept part of the blame with 20+ tabs open, a good chunk of them running FireBug or some other sort of dev tool. Whatever, I have enough memory.

Nope, it's the little, annoying things. Bugs that I simply cannot track down, or tiny UI things that take hours to sort out after every update.

1) Random stuttering during scrolling and typing. It's like moving through molasses. It's random, seems to be gone on some of my computers after the latest update, but maybe not. Type of a few words an the[ pause ]n the rest comes out after a d[ pause ] elay.

2) Flash videos stutter and skip. Not the sound, just the video. Makes shit absolutely unwatchable when every 5 seconds, it freezes for 2 seconds. The upside is I don't bother much with Youtube. The downside is that if there's anything I want to watch, I have to use Youtube Downloader or something simliar. Annoying.

3) Why the goddamn hell is a lowercase "o" tucked way the fucking hell underneath the curve of an "r"? Oh, right, someone, somewhere, decided it would be fun to push an experimental font renderer into production. You know what you get when you tuck the o underneath the r? An incomprehensible blob that my brain's pattern recognition software doesn't grok, and forces me to stop, stare at the mess, and say "wtf?". Queue up an hour of googling until I can even find the right keywords to describe the problem, and I finally come across Shit McNoone's blog about which about:config setting I have to find/edit/replace to get the old font rendering back.

4) A slew of other UI and performance issues that all involve hours of googling to find an about:config setting to change.

5) Status barrrrrrrrrraarrrrrrrrrrrrg!

I'm hoping-- I'm really hoping-- that all this is just FF's teenage years. It's rebelling, trying to be different on purpose. I want to beat it to death with it's own bloated version number. And yet, I can tell myself it's just a phase-- it'll staighten up and be a good citizen, once it gets though all of this.

I have lots of issues with Firefox, but they're mostly due to various bugs and issues it's had that never get fixed. And some of those are the W3C's fault. (Are disabled checkbox and radio controls supposed to still fire click handlers? WHO CAN FUCKING TELL! But Firefox sez no, and every other browser ever in the universe says yes.)

I don't really use it enough to judge it's stability fairly. I just debug my shit in it.

Well, FireBug kind of was a firefox-brainchild, same as adblock, most of the Jscript-tools and they are pretty active behind the scenes with the whole HTML5-thing. So yeah, don't say they never did anything for you

FireBug was just a fixed version of Microsoft's DOM Explorer, which was available back in IE5.

The REAL mystery is why so many "web developers" were ignorant of DOM Explorer and didn't notice that a tool of that type existed until FireBug came around years later. You'd almost think... web developers are all shitty at their jobs? Nah! Couldn't be!

But stop saying Firefox invented the idea of FireBug. They ripped it off from Microsoft, plain and simple. (That's not a bad thing; like I said they did really improve the tool. But they certainly didn't invent it.)

Oh, and BTW, IE5 had this thing called "toolbar extensions" also. They worked almost exactly like Firefox Add-Ins. WOW! ANOTHER THING FIREFOX DIDN'T INVENT BUT GETS CREDIT FOR! Feh. Seriously, Firefox fans rewrite history more often than Airstrip One.

The REAL mystery is why so many "web developers" were ignorant of DOM Explorer and didn't notice that a tool of that type existed until FireBug came around years later. You'd almost think... web developers are all shitty at their jobs? Nah! Couldn't be!

I didn't know DOM explorer existed in IE - then again, I'm not a web developer - but given that the majority of browser users aren't devs, it didn't make sense to include many tools like this by default since they're approriate to a niche audience.

But stop saying Firefox invented the idea of FireBug. They ripped it off from Microsoft, plain and simple. (That's not a bad thing; like I said they did really improve the tool. But they certainly didn't invent it.)

Makes a change; MS have a reputation of ripping off others' work and passing it off as their own (admittedly, greatly improving it in the process, so that's another thing the Mozilla group copied!).

Oh, and BTW, IE5 had this thing called "toolbar extensions" also. They worked almost exactly like Firefox Add-Ins. WOW! ANOTHER THING FIREFOX DIDN'T INVENT BUT GETS CREDIT FOR!

Possibly because most people's idea of IE extensions around v5 was limited to annoying toolbars (Gator, Alexia, etc) but FF pushed their plugin extensions quite hard. I remember someone showing me IE's WebDev toolbar years back and at the time, it fucked Firefoxes right out of the water (Chris Pendick's Web Dev Toolbar) and crapped all over FF's "Add n Edit Cookies" from a great height. I know toolbar extensions were mentioned with all the marketing hype surrounding IE7 & 8, but not actually seen many in action; I'm guessing it's to do with the audience usage.

I could go through all the pros and cons with each browser, but overall all three are good (IE used to be hated by me, but the recent versions have been good). As for Firefox the only time I ever had a serious issue with it was when a virus got to it and my virus protect software 'fixed' it. I don't know what my virus protection software did but Firefox would take 2+ minutes to open and would randomly lock up for a minute when I had lots of tabs open. It was so badly messed up that not even reinstalling it worked. As a result I had to use Chrome. I have since reformated that old computer (because of other reasons) and Firefox now works like a charm again. During my hiatus from Firefox, Chrome did a good job covering. The only time it let me down, was when there was a security update pushed out for it, and it kindly wiped out all my links, custom settings, and theme (and it would not let me set my theme back to what it was originally). I now have a Windows 7 laptop and Firefox works wonderfully, no issues.

I didn't know DOM explorer existed in IE - then again, I'm not a web developer - but given that the majority of browser users aren't devs, it didn't make sense to include many tools like this by default since they're approriate to a niche audience.

Yeah, DOM Explorer was a separate download. Just like FireBug. What the hell are you trying to say?

Makes a change; MS have a reputation of ripping off others' work and passing it off as their own (admittedly, greatly improving it in the process, so that's another thing the Mozilla group copied!).

In the web arena, Microsoft has a history of inventing great things (DOM Explorer, xmlHttpRequest, element.readyState, innerText) only to have the W3C either shit all over it, or pointlessly antagonize them by ruining it. (See: textContent become the standard, because when Mozilla ripped-off innerText God-forbid they call it innerText, they have it a dumber, less meaningful name.) In every place where Microsoft deviated from the spec, their deviation is far, far superior to what's in the spec. (Take a look at the Button parameter on mouse events sometime.) And that's not even getting into the CSS box model stuff where they really got fucked...

Oh and hey, the original HTML standard said embedding languages other than JavaScript (like, say, VBScript) was fine and dandy! So Microsoft did it. Then they get people jeering at them for decades about what a dumb idea it was-- yeah it was a dumb idea, but it wasn't their dumb idea, it was in the fucking spec! They were just implementing the fucking spec!

And I wrote this fucking post after 11.0 crashed on me twice in 20 minutes for no goddamn reason, so don't tell me 11.0 is some paragon of stability.

I'm sorry. Have you investigated things like corrupted profiles etc?

If you are really having that much trouble then there's a very good chance that a corupted profile is responsible.

I have been running Firefox since back when it was called Firebird, and I've rarely had an problems. I'm currently using FF 9 and it works fine for me, no crashes, and uses less RAM than Chrome (FF - 200MB vs Chrome 580MB with the same tabs open). On the few occasions when I've had a problem, it was almost always fixed by deleting my profile and starting over with a new one. A couple months ago I started having problems with my browsing history. It's kept in a file called places.sqlite and every couple of days that file would get corrupted and I would lose my entire browsing history. I could tell when it happened because i would also lose all the "favicons" on my bookmarks. Then I deleted my profile and started over with a new one and I haven't had a problem since. Having to delete your profile in order to fix a problem is a huge pain in the ass and seems like a horrendously bad design flaw..

Well, I agree if we're talking about IE9 (7 and 8 still have painfully slow javascript engines, but were otherwise much better than 6). But even then, only the 32 bit version. Does anyone know why the 64-bit version doesn't JIT javascript? I haven't looked in a while...have they fixed that yet? Plans to fix, etc?

If you are really having that much trouble then there's a very good chance that a corupted profile is responsible.

Firefox knows when it crashes yes? Why doesn't it do what Outlook does, and if there's a few crashes in a short period offer to disable add-ins? If the crashes continue, offer to rebuild the profile?

They could save their customer-base with a few hundred lines of code in a case like this. The reason people think Mozilla is shit is because they haven't bothered. Just like they haven't bothered with process separation even after all their competitors have had it for years. Including IE, the slowest-moving one.

Well, FireBug kind of was a firefox-brainchild, same as adblock, most of the Jscript-tools and they are pretty active behind the scenes with the whole HTML5-thing. So yeah, don't say they never did anything for you

FireBug was just a fixed version of Microsoft's DOM Explorer, which was available back in IE5.

The REAL mystery is why so many "web developers" were ignorant of DOM Explorer and didn't notice that a tool of that type existed until FireBug came around years later. You'd almost think... web developers are all shitty at their jobs? Nah! Couldn't be!

But stop saying Firefox invented the idea of FireBug. They ripped it off from Microsoft, plain and simple. (That's not a bad thing; like I said they did really improve the tool. But they certainly didn't invent it.)

Oh, and BTW, IE5 had this thing called "toolbar extensions" also. They worked almost exactly like Firefox Add-Ins. WOW! ANOTHER THING FIREFOX DIDN'T INVENT BUT GETS CREDIT FOR! Feh. Seriously, Firefox fans rewrite history more often than Airstrip One.

Gotta agree with the contrarians here. A quick count shows I've currently got 28 tabs open in 6 windows. Task Manager says it's using a tad north of 800 MB of RAM for that. It's been running completely stable since the last time I rebooted the system, which was sometime last week. I'm not sure what's causing the problems you're seeing, but it's not Firefox.

I tried it when it first came out, with the little Google videos of these really cool people that are even cooler than Apple, and all wear T-shirts and have PhDs, and they make all these really cool products that are so cool that they could make a penguin sweat its pants (or tuxedo), and they give them for free to you because you're a cool dude, too.

Wow. Well, I'm glad you at least admit you make technical decisions not based on merits but instead on your psychological issues.

@Severity One said:

AdBlock Plus.

Asshole.

@Severity One said:

Colourful tabs

I don't even..

@Severity One said:

IE tab (run IE in a Firefox tab, because quite a few of our intranet sites don't work nice with Firefox)

Jesus Christ.. why?? Just run IE normal-like. Why do you need to embed it in a Firefox tab?

Firefox used to be really great when it was the only real alternative to IE. It looked amazing. But then Webkit came to popularity, Chrome and Safari always having the most bleeding-edge HTML and CSS features, both having wicked fast Javascript engines.. Firefox hasn't really moved that far in the whole length of Chromes reign.

They have (in the most recent release) added CSS3D transforms.. but they're broken compared to IE10/Safari/Chrome.

They have started to build in rudementary Inspector type features in recent builds.. but Webkit (Safari/Chrome) and even IE (to a lesser extent.. why must I manually refresh the DOM tree in the IE inspector?!) have much better debugging tools.

Firefox then thought that a drastically incrementing version number would do them good.. but all it really shows is how little they accomplish in 6 weeks.

Now.. Chrome isn't really that good for RAM usage either, but it atleast is fast while eating all that RAM. Firefox is about as slow as a slug that smoked a bit too much weed.

Oh.. and there's the fact that before.. when I used Firefox.. I would lose my bookmarks about once every 3 months.. Look through profile data.. nothing there. Just gone with no rhyme or reason.

Don't lie, you are not sorry. But no, it's not a corrupted profile. I can replace (and have replaced) my profile willy-nilly because I don't use Firefox for anything useful. No, Firefox is just fucked.

I'm not sure what's causing the problems you're seeing, but it's not Firefox.

Of course it is. Firefox is the only application that crashes like this. What's more, as I've mentioned several times, it's been like this for years on several different hardware setups running Linux, OSX and Windows. Linux is my primary OS so it's where I have the most experience. That said, I've run 32-bit and 64-bit versions. I've run: from the package manager; latest binaries from Mozilla; and compiled from source. It does not matter. The real bad crashing started around 3.x.

I'm starting to think you people are real browsing dilettantes--right now I have 46 tabs open in Chrome and that's a low number for me. It's using.. maybe 2gb of memory, which ain't great but I can live with it because at least Chrome works.

... only to have the W3C either shit all over it, or pointlessly antagonize them by ruining it. (See: textContent become the standard, because when Mozilla ripped-off innerText God-forbid they call it innerText, they have it a dumber, less meaningful name.)

Oh, let's not start recounting examples of fuckwittery with the W3C's signature over it; not enough hours in the day on that front.

Oh and hey, the original HTML standard said embedding languages other than JavaScript (like, say, VBScript) was fine and dandy! So Microsoft did it. Then they get people jeering at them for decades about what a dumb idea it was-- yeah it was a dumb idea, but it wasn't their dumb idea, it was in the fucking spec! They were just implementing the fucking spec!

I think they got a kicking over that because it was a browser-specific language and started the slippery slope of web-pages that only worked in a certain web browser, and also that the VBS engine covered Outlook, WMP and Win Explorer offered a greater number of attack vectors. There was also the faff about JScript and different DOM implementations, but I gather the latter were more about MS creating some new DOM functionality but not waiting around until the W3C got off their collective arses to ratify it as a standard, adding it into their products as standard.

In the web arena, Microsoft has a history of inventing great things (DOM Explorer, xmlHttpRequest, element.readyState, innerText) only to have the W3C either shit all over it, or pointlessly antagonize them by ruining it. (See: textContent become the standard, because when Mozilla ripped-off innerText God-forbid they call it innerText, they have it a dumber, less meaningful name.) In every place where Microsoft deviated from the spec, their deviation is far, far superior to what's in the spec. (Take a look at the Button parameter on mouse events sometime.) And that's not even getting into the CSS box model stuff where they really got fucked...

Oh and hey, the original HTML standard said embedding languages other than JavaScript (like, say, VBScript) was fine and dandy! So Microsoft did it. Then they get people jeering at them for decades about what a dumb idea it was-- yeah it was a dumb idea, but it wasn't their dumb idea, it was in the fucking spec! They were just implementing the fucking spec!

XmlHttpRequest is the only exception here, really.

Tabbed Browsing was kind of the deal-breaker, especially when Microsoft decided to not have a browser-team after IE6 until market pressure fucked that idea up.

Start up a fresh IE9 on a set-up PC, what is the first thing you see? "Do you want to disable Add-Ons? This can speed up your browser". Sure, that is the very first thing I want to do.

And if you think Microsoft's implementation of CSS is superior, you need a reality check. I still get the urge to strangle somebody whenever float:left breaks everything in every IE older than 9, and in the compatibility mode.